How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
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My English: A Note from the Author
Reading and Discussion Guide
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My English
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A Note from the Author
Mami and Papi used to speak in English when they had a
secret they wanted to keep from us children. We lived then
in the Dominican Republic, and the family as a whole spoke
only Spanish at home, until my sisters and I started school at
Carol Morgan and we became a bilingual family. Spanish had
its many tongues as well. There was the castellano of Padre
Juaquín from Spain, whose lisp we all loved to imitate. Then
the educated español my parents’ families spoke, aunts and
uncles who were always correcting us children, for we spent
most of the day with the maids and so had picked up their
“bad Spanish.” Campesinas, theirs was a lilting animated
campuno, s’s swallowed, endings chopped off, funny turns of
phrase. This campuno was my true mother tongue, not the
Spanish of Calderón de la Barca or Cervantes or even Neruda,
but of Chucha and Iluminada and Gladys and Ursulina from
Published, 1989, in the Proceedings of the Ollantay Center Conference.
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Juncalito and Licey and Boca de Yuma and San Juan de la
Maguana. Those women yakked as they cooked: they storytold, they gossiped, they prayed, they sang — boleros, merengues, mangulinas, mariachis, salves. Theirs were the voices
that belonged to the rain and the wind and the teeny teeny
stars even a small child could blot out with her thumb.
Besides all these versions of Spanish, every once in a while
another strange tongue emerged from my papi’s mouth or my
mami’s lips. What I first recognized was not a language but
a tone of voice, serious, urgent, something important and top
secret being said, some uncle in trouble, someone divorcing,
someone dead. Say it in English so the children won’t understand. I would listen, straining to understand, thinking that
this was not a different language but just another and harder
version of Spanish. Say it in English so the children won’t understand. From the beginning English was the sound of worry
and secrets, the sound of being left out.
I could make no sense of this “harder Spanish,” and so I
tried by other means to find out what was going on. I knew
my mami’s face by heart. When the little lines on the corners
of her eyes crinkled, she was amused. When her nostrils flared
and she bit her lips, she was trying hard not to laugh. She held
her head down, eyes glancing up, when she thought someone
was lying. Whenever she spoke that gibberish English, I translated the general content by watching the Spanish expressions
on her face.
Soon, at the Carol Morgan School, I began to learn more
English. That is, when I had stopped gawking. The teacher and
some of the American children had the strangest coloration:
My English 295
light hair, light eyes, light skin, as if Ursulina had soaked
them in bleach too long, to’deteñío. I did have some blond
cousins, but they had deeply tanned skin, and as they grew
older, their hair darkened, so their earlier paleness seemed a
phase of their acquiring normal color. Just as strange was the
little girl in my reader who had a cat and a dog that looked
just like un gatito y un perrito. Her mami was Mother and her
papi Father. Why have a whole new language for school and for
books with a teacher who could speak it teaching you double
the amount of words you really needed?
Butter, butter, butter, butter. All day, one English word
that had particularly struck me would go round and round in
my mouth and weave through all the Spanish in my head, until by the end of the day the word did sound like just another
Spanish word. And so I would say, “Mami, por favor pásame
la butter.” She would scowl and say in English, “I’m sorry, I
don’t understand. But would you be needing some butter on
your bread?”
Why my parents didn’t first educate us in our native language by enrolling us in a Dominican school, I don’t know.
Part of it was that Mami’s family had a tradition of sending
the boys to the States to boarding school and college, and she
had been one of the first girls to be allowed to join her brothers. At Abbot Academy, whose school song was our lullaby as
babies (“Although Columbus and Cabot never heard of Abbot,
it’s quite the place for you and me”), she had become quite
Americanized. It was very important, she kept saying, that we
learn our English. Always she used the possessive pronoun:
your English, an inheritance we had come into and must
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wisely use. Unfortunately, my English became all mixed up
with our Spanish.
Mixup, or what’s now called Spanglish, was the language
we spoke for several years. There wasn’t a sentence that wasn’t
colonized by an English word. At school, a Spanish word
would suddenly slide into my English like someone butting
into line. Mrs. Buchanan, whose face I was learning to read as
minutely as my mother’s, would scowl, but no smile played
on her lips. Her pale skin made her strange countenance hard
to read, so I often misjudged how much I could get away with.
Whenever I made a mistake, Mrs. Buchanan would shake her
head slowly, “In English, Jew-LEE-AH, there’s no such word as
columpio. Do you mean a swing?”
I would bow my head, embarrassed, humiliated by the
smiles and snickers of the American children around me. I
grew insecure about Spanish. My native tongue was not quite
as good as English, as if words like columpio were illegal immigrants trying to cross a border into another language. But
Mrs. Buchanan’s discerning grammar-and-vocabulary-patrol
ears could tell and send them back.
Soon I was talking up an English storm. “Did you eat an
English parrot?” my grandfather asked one Sunday. I had just
enlisted yet one more patient servant to listen to my rendition of Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers at breakneck pace. “Huh?” I asked impolitely in English, putting him
in his place. Cat got your tongue? No big deal, I could quip.
So there! Take that! Holy Toledo! (Mrs. Buchanan’s favorite
“curse word”). Go jump in the lake! Really dumb. Golly.
Gosh. Slang, little tricks, clichés, sayings, hotshot language
My English 297
that our teacher labeled ponderously: idiomatic expressions.
Riddles, jokes, puns, conundrums, little exchanges. What is
yellow and goes click-click? Why did the chicken cross the
road? See you later, Alligator. How wonderful to call someone
an alligator and not be scolded for being disrespectful. In fact,
they were supposed to say back, In a while, Crocodile.
There was also a neat little trick I wanted to try on
an English-speaking adult at home. I had learned it from
Elizabeth, my smart-alecky friend in fourth grade whom I
alternately worshipped and resented. I’d ask her a question
that required an explanation, and she’d answer, “Because . . .”
“Elizabeth, how come you didn’t go to Isabel’s birthday
party?” “Because . . .” “Why didn’t you put your name in your
reader?” “Because . . .” I thought that such a cool way to get
around having to come up with answers. So I practiced saying
it under my breath, planning for the day I could use it on an
unsuspecting English-speaking adult.
One Sunday at our extended family dinner, my grandfather sat down at the children’s table to chat with us. He
was famous, in fact, for the way he could carry on adult conversations with his grandchildren. He always spoke to us
in English so that we could practice speaking it out of the
classroom. He was a Cornell man, a world traveler, a United
Nations representative from our country. He gave speeches in
English. Perfect English, my mother’s phrase. That Sunday, he
asked me a question. I can’t even remember what it was because I wasn’t really listening but lying in wait for my chance
“Because . . . ,” I answered him, the way Elizabeth said it.
Papito waited a second for the rest of my sentence and then
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gave me a thumbnail grammar lesson: “Because has to be followed by a clause.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, nonplussed.
“Because,” he winked. “Just because.”
A beginning wordsmith, I had so much left to learn; sometimes it was disheartening. Once Tío Gus, the family intellectual, put a tiny grain of salt on my grandparents’ big dining
table during Sunday dinner. He said, “Imagine this whole table is the human brain. Then this teensy grain is all we ever
use of our intelligence!” His face kept getting redder, his voice
louder and louder as he enumerated geniuses who had perhaps used two grains, maybe three. Einstein, Michelangelo,
da Vinci, Beethoven. “It’s been scientifically proven,” Tío Gus
argued when his older brother told him to stop exaggerating.
We children believed him. It was the kind of impossible fact
we thrived on, proving as it did that the world out there was
not drastically different from the one we were making up in
our heads.
Later, driving home, Mami said to Papi that Manuel was
right, their younger brother Gus loved to exaggerate. “You have
to take everything he says with a grain of salt,” she concluded. I
thought she was still referring to Tío Gus’s demonstration, and
I tried to puzzle out what she was saying. Finally, I asked what
she meant. “Taking what someone ways with a grain of salt is
an idiomatic expression in English,” she explained. It was pure
voodoo is what it was — what later I learned poetry could also
do: a grain of salt could both symbolize the human brain and
be a condiment for human nonsense. And it could be itself too,
a grain of salt to flavor a bland plate of American food.
My English 299
When I was ten, we emigrated to New York. How
astonishing, a country where everyone spoke English! These
people must be smarter, I thought. Maids, waiters, taxi drivers, doormen, bums on the street, garbagemen, all spoke this
difficult language. It took some time before I understood that
Americans were not necessarily a smarter, superior race. It
was as natural for them to learn their mother tongue as it was
for a little Dominican baby to learn Spanish. It came with
mother’s milk, my mother explained, and for a while I thought
a mother tongue was a mother tongue because you got it from
your mother’s breast, along with nutrients and vitamins.
Soon it wasn’t so strange that everyone was speaking in
English instead of Spanish. I learned not to hear it as English,
but as sense. I no longer strained to understand, I understood.
I relaxed in this second language. Only when someone with
a heavy southern or British accent spoke in a movie or when
the priest droned his sermon — only then did I experience that
little catch of anxiety. I worried that I would not be able to understand, that I wouldn’t be able to “keep up” with the voice
speaking in this acquired language. I would be like those people
from the Bible we had studied in religion class, at the foot of an
enormous tower that looked just like the skyscrapers all around
me. They had been punished for their pride by being made to
speak some slightly different version of the same language so
that they didn’t understand what anyone was saying.
But at the foot of those towering New York skyscrapers,
I began to understand more and more — not less and less — English. In sixth grade, I had one of the first of a lucky line
of great English teachers who began to nurture a love of the
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language, a love that had been there since a childhood of listening closely to words. Sister Bernadette did not make our
class interminably diagram sentences from a workbook or
learn a catechism of grammar rules. Instead, she asked us to
write little stories imagining we were snowflakes, birds, pianos, a stone in the pavement, a star in the sky. What would it
feel like to be a flower with roots in the ground? If the clouds
could talk, what would they say? She had an expressive,
dreamy look that was accentuated by her face being framed in
a wimple. Supposing, just supposing . . . My mind would take
off, soaring into possibilities, a flower wit roots, a star in the
sky, a cloud full of sad sad tears, a piano crying out each time
its back was tapped, music only to our ears.
Sister Bernadette stood at the chalkboard. Her chalk was
always snapping in two because she wrote with so much energy, her whole habit shaking with the swing of her arm, her
hand tap tap tapping on the board. “Here’s a simple sentence:
The snow fell.” Sister Bernadette pointed with her chalk, her
eyebrows lifted, her wimple poked up. Sometimes I could see
little bits of gray hair disclosed by her wobbly habit. “But
watch what happens if we put an adverb at the beginning and
a prepositional phrase at the end: Gently the snow fell on the
bare hills.” I thought about the snow. I saw how it might fall
on the hills, tapping lightly on the bare branches of trees.
Softly it would fall on the cold cold fields. On toys children
had left out in the cold, and on cars and on little birds and
on people out late walking on the streets. Sister Bernadette
filled the chalkboard with snowy print, on and on, handling
and shaping and moving the language, scribbling all over the
My English 301
board until English, those little bricks of meaning, those little
fixed units and counters, became a charged, fluid mass that
carried me in its great fluent waves, rolling and moving onward, to deposit me on the shores of the only homeland. I was
no longer a foreigner with no ground to stand on. I had landed
in language.
I had come into my English.
Reading and Discussion Guide
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Author
Julia Alvarez was born in New York City in 1950. When she was
three months old, her family moved to the Dominican Republic,
where she spent the first ten years of her life. Her family enjoyed a relatively affluent lifestyle there but was forced to return
to the United States in 1960, after her father participated in a
failed coup against the Dominican military dictatorship. This
experience would later inspire her first novel, How the García
Girls Lost Their Accents. After high school, Alvarez continued
her education at Connecticut College, Middlebury College, and
Syracuse University. Having earned a master’s degree, she took
on a variety of jobs, including serving as the writer-in-residence
for the Kentucky Arts Commission and teaching English and
creative writing at California State University, the University
of Vermont, George Washington University, and the University
of Illinois. In 1996, she was promoted to full-time professor at
Middlebury College but resigned the position in 1998 in order
to devote her time to writing.
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Alvarez’s work is strongly informed by her own experiences, in particular her movement between the Dominican
Republic and the United States and the resulting feelings of
displacement and alienation. How the García Girls Lost Their
Accents is widely regarded as the first major novel in English
by a Dominican author. Like much of Alvarez’s writing, it
explores the immigrant experience and the ways in which it
is shaped by gender and class. Her work also illuminates the
cultural divides between the United States and the Caribbean
world. These cultural tensions shape how she sees writing and
the role of the storyteller:
As storytellers we belong to the human family, but as individuals we belong to families, particular communities, we
live in relationships, bound to individuals, and they often
want us to tell stories that promote and affirm their point
of view or their “take” on the world. But we fail in our mission as storytellers if we try to be spokespersons or apologists for any one point of view. Our task is to tell the truth,
“manifold and one”— a quote by Joseph Conrad I’ve always
loved! And this means that we often present not just the
one truth, our tribe’s truth, but the manifold truth, which
includes the complexities, competing realities of any situation. That may feel like a betrayal of what we “owe” our
families, communities, our particular tribe. (http://labloga
.blogspot.com/2007/08/interview-with-julia-alvarez.html)
Alvarez lives with her husband in the “Latino-compromised”
state of Vermont and travels to the Dominican Republic frequently. She helped create and remains involved with Alta
Gracia, a farm and literacy center dedicated to the environ-
Reading and Discussion Guide 305
mentally sustainable growth of organic coffee and the promotion of literacy and education.
Summary
This novel is structured in three sections, which are arranged in reverse chronological order. Part 1, which takes
place between 1989 and 1972, focuses on the adult lives of the
García sisters. Yolanda, who narrates several of the stories in
first person, becomes the focus of the book. The first chapter, “Antojos,” deals with Yolanda’s return to the Dominican
Republic as an adult and her interactions with her family there.
“The Four Girls” introduces the sisters and their relationships
more thoroughly and establishes their deep sense of family
unity as they gather to celebrate their father’s birthday. “The
Kiss” focuses on Sofia, when their father discovers a collection
of love letters addressed to her from a stranger. Outraged, he
confronts her, and she runs off with her German lover. “The
Rudy Elmenhurst Story,” the last of part 1, is also narrated by
Yolanda, as she tells the story of her first real relationship and
the difficulties she faced in trying to find someone who understood her immigrant background and personal identity.
Part 2, set between 1970 and 1960, deals with the family’s
experience as recent immigrants to the United States. “A
Regular Revolution” describes the sisters’ initial reaction to
life in the United States. While they initially find it uncomfortable and foreign and regularly pray to return home, they
soon adjust and actually find themselves dreading summers
in the Dominican Republic. “Daughter of Invention” is about
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Mami, her frustrated creativity, and her dreams for Yolanda’s
future. The third story, “Trespass,” is about Carla’s experience dealing with racist attitudes at school as well as being
confronted with some of the more seedy and unsavory aspects
of urban life. “Snow,” the shortest story in the book, is about a
young Yolanda’s fears during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The final story, “Floor Show,” takes place during dinner with friends
at a Spanish restaurant, during which Laura witnesses an odd
interaction between her father and the host’s wife.
Part 3 presents the sisters as young children during the
period between 1960 and 1956. While they live a life of privilege in the Dominican Republic, trouble brews as their father
becomes involved in a plot against the military dictatorship
that runs the country. “The Blood of the Conquistadores”
opens with government agents bursting into the García home
in search of Carlos. His antigovernment activities have made
his family a target, and while they escape immediate danger, they are forced to emigrate quickly to New York. “The
Human Body” contrasts Yolanda’s childhood education and
creativity with the brutality of the political regime running
her country. “Still Lives” deals with Sandi’s artistic talent
and the ways in which creativity is shaped during childhood.
Taking place during the Christmas holidays, “An American
Surprise” tells the story of the Christmas gifts Papi brings
back from New York for his girls and the impressions they
get of the United States based upon the gifts. The final chapter, “The Drum,” is told by Yolanda. She recalls her own
Christmas gift, a drum, the discovery of a litter of stray cats,
and the ways her life changed when the family moved to New
York.
Reading and Discussion Guide 307
Questions for Discussion
1. The storyline in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is
arranged in reverse chronological order. How does this structure affect the overall narrative?
2. Part of the heading for each chapter is the name of the
daughter or daughters who provide the focus and viewpoint.
How does this affect the way you read the book and the ways
the characters develop?
3. What does the book have to say about the relationships between men and women? Is this affected by time and geography, that is, the Dominican Republic vs. the United States, or
the 1950s as compared with the 1970s?
4. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents addresses generational differences among the girls, their parents, and their
grandparents. How do these appear in individual episodes and
in the overall narrative?
5. Love, marriage, and the many manifestations thereof appear throughout this story. Is there an overall message or
theme that stands out?
6. Due to the structure of the book, the reader first encounters
the adult García sisters, who struggle with Spanish during
trips to the Dominican Republic and are far more comfortable with life in the United States. As the novel progresses
backward through time, their younger selves are gradually
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revealed, and you see them struggle with life in the United
States and dread immigration to the new country. What messages does the book have about the immigrant experience?
Does the book’s organization affect that message?
7. Sexuality remains a complex, and often unspoken, part
of many of the stories in How the García Girls Lost Their
Accents. How does it manifest itself? Why does it remain unspoken or, alternately, burst to the surface?
8. Why did Alvarez choose How the García Girls Lost Their
Accents as the title? Is “losing one’s accent” a metaphor for
the immigrant experience? Does “losing one’s accent” perhaps also include self-definition and individual identity?
9. The parents of the girls work very hard to ensure that their
family remains close, and close to its roots. How do the girls
react to these efforts? Do Mami and Papi necessarily succeed
the way they intend?
10. Both as an abstract and in reality, the United States looms
large in this book. How do the characters’ impressions of and
ideas about the United States change throughout the book?
What causes these changes?
11. The girls’ father undergoes as many changes and challenges
as the other characters. How is he presented throughout the
book? How does he change, and why? In what ways does his
changing character affect the life of the family?
Reading and Discussion Guide 309
12. History — of the family, of the Dominican Republic, and of
the United States — is a large part of the subtext of the stories.
How do the characters react to these various histories, both
familial and national? How does history shape the lives of the
family members?
13. The García girls are assigned a wide variety of nicknames
throughout the book. What are the sources of these nicknames, and how do they affect the characters who bear them?
In particular, how does Yolanda react to some of the names
that are given to her?
Further Reading
Fiction
sandra cisneros, Caramelo (2003)
Cisneros follows the lives and fortunes of the Reyes family,
from their origins in Mexico through their immigration to
the United States and the lives they shape for themselves
there. Told as a series of stories collected by Celaya Reyes,
a first-generation Mexican-American girl, Caramelo combines these diverse tales into a comprehensive story that
deals with ethnic and gender identity and the process of selfdefinition. The book is steeped in the history of both nations,
and includes many footnotes and a timeline of U.S.-Mexican
history.
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junot díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)
On the surface, Díaz’s novel is the story of the eponymous
hero, an overweight, “lovesick ghetto nerd” Dominican boy
growing up in New Jersey. Upon closer examination, however,
it becomes the story of three generations of a family as well
as an exploration of cultural identity. Steeped in the history
and myth of the Dominican Republic, and reflecting the experiences of Dominicans in both the United States and their
home country, this novel offers insights into the immigrant
experience that complement Alvarez’s story.
cristina garcía, Dreaming in Cuban (1993)
García’s first novel weaves together strands of story and memory to explore the life of a Cuban family both at home and in
exile in the United States. Three generations of del Pino women
and their often-troubled inner lives are explored against the
backdrop of revolution and change in two countries. Dreaming
in Cuban offers insight into the lives and challenges of Cuban
women and their immigrant experience.
jhumpa lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (2000)
Lahiri’s collection of short stories deals with many of the same
themes found in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.
The characters, displaced from their homeland, find themselves struggling to adapt to new circumstances while dealing
with the weight of their own history. Love, tradition, illness,
and family are among the ideas Lahiri explores in Interpreter
of Maladies.
Reading and Discussion Guide 311
Nonfiction
edwidge danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (2007)
One day in 2004, Danticat learned that she was pregnant with
her first child and that her father was terminally ill. Using
these events as a framework, she begins a memoir that explores the story of her family, from her parents’ life in Haiti
and her own childhood there to the family’s immigration to
the United States. Both personal and political, Brother, I’m
Dying touches on family history, national tragedy, and the
nature of identity.
The Reading and Discussion Guide was provided by EBSCO
Publishing readers’ resource NoveList—all rights reserved.
NoveList is available at most public libraries.
bill eichner
Julia Alvarez emigrated to this country with her parents at
the age of ten. She is the author of six novels and has also published three books of poems, two nonfiction books, and eight
books for young readers. A writer-in-residence at Middlebury
College, Alvarez established with her husband, Bill Eichner,
Alta Gracia, an organic coffee farm–literacy arts center, in her
homeland, the Dominican Republic.
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, her first novel,
originally published in 1991, has received many honors, including the 1991 Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles Award and selection as a notable book by both the New York Times and the
American Library Association. The book was later selected
as one of twenty-one classics for the twenty-first century by
New York librarians and was one of four texts chosen for the
national reading project, “A Latino National Conversation,”
by the Great Books Foundation. In 2008, the Roundhouse
Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland, held the world premiere of
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, a play by Karen
Zacarías based on the novel.